People feel greater empathy for puppies and even full-grown dogs subjected to violence than they do for battered adults, a new study shows.

Presented at the 108th Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association, the report examined the reactions of 240 men and women between the ages of 18 and 25, each of whom randomly received one of four fictional news articles. Each story was identical in every way with one exception -- the victim, which varied between an infant, an adult in his 30s, a puppy and a 6-year-old dog.

An outspoken animal rights group wants the Maine farmhouse of late children’s book author E.B. White to be converted into a “pig empathy museum.”

White’s book “Charlotte’s Web” is about farm animals who talk to each other and prominently features a pig named Wilbur. The 1952 book is one of the bestselling children’s books of all time and has been the source material for multiple feature-length movies in the decades since its release.

The PETA Empathy Center—located in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles and just down the road from the Bob Barker Building, PETA’s West Coast headquarters—will host a variety of events geared toward teaching the values of justice, respect, understanding, and compassion for all living beings, regardless of race, religion, ability, gender, or specie

Do animals show empathy? Are there any signs of morality in animal societies? Can a monkey distinguish right from wrong? And what are the standards of what is right and what is not? Does morality evolve in time both for human societies and animal societies?

It is hard to imagine that empathy—a characteristic so basic to the human species that it emerges early in life, and is accompanied by strong physiological reactions—came into existence only when our lineage split off from that of the apes. It must be far older than that. Examples of empathy in other animals would suggest a long evolutionary history to this capacity in humans.

Over the last several decades, we’ve seen increasing evidence of empathy in other species. Emotions suffuse much of the language employed by students of animal behavior -- from "social bonding" to "alarm calls" -- yet are often avoided as explicit topic in scientific discourse.

Duke researchers tracked how signals ping back and forth within the brain during empathic decision-making in rats.

By combining electrical monitoring of neural activity with machine learning, a team of neuroscientists has tuned into the brain chatter of rats engaged in helping other rats. The results clarify earlier conflicting findings on the role of specific brain regions, such as the insula, in guiding antisocial and psychopathic behavior, and may shed light on how to encourage altruistic behavior in humans.

Yesterday there was a horrific car accident just steps from my home. Upon hearing the sound of the crash, several neighbours ran to the street to make sure everyone was okay. As several ambulance arrived, and we caught a glimpse of the situation, many of us began to gasp. Looking over at my friend, I saw she was crying.

Though my friend did not know the victims, she was clearly affected. My reaction was to hug her, and keep hugging her as we both felt this innate worry and sadness for the victims of the crash.

This instance — of consoling, and of empathy — would later remind me of a recent study Marie Lindegaard, a scientist at the Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement, led.

Like chimpanzees, humans may console their threatened peers out of empathy, according to a study published May 31, 2017 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Marie Rosenkrantz Lindegaard from the Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement (NSCR), The Netherlands, and the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, and colleagues.

Consolation is generally defined as an uninvolved bystander initiating friendly contact with a victim of aggression. Previous research has suggested that children and chimpanzees console their peers, but there is little research on consolation in human adults.

His findings support research that shows that dogs understand concepts of empathy and inequality. As dog guardians can attest, dogs will lick or nuzzle humans or other animals who are crying or hurting, demonstrating an ability to read and understand emotions, even in different species, to empathize, and to try to help.

Show dogs that you, too, understand fairness, inequality, and empathy. Give them plenty of playtime, exercise, socialization, and affection, and adopt—don’t shop.

We’ve all heard it before: Dogs are man’s best friend. They are extremely loyal, loving, and sensitive, always seeming to know when you need some cheering up. Well, a new study shows that they do in fact know when you are feeling down, or happy, or any other emotion, because they have the ability to read human emotion. They do this through interpreting various stimuli, such as visual and auditory cues, and they are the only creatures aside from humans that have been shown to have this ability...

It was found that dogs are also able to imitate each other’s expressions, which shows that they have the capacity for empathy as well

If you have a pet you need to know this. Veterinary professionals are feeling the heat – and paying a price. Forever veterinarians have had empathy for your pets, for wildlife, zoo and farm animals. Maybe now it’s time for you to understand the flip side.

I don’t pretend to be an expert on depression and suicide, but, as for veterinarians, it stands to reason that the enormous debt load of students coming out of school (and I mean monumental) may play a role, and it’s a good guess that the personality type of the average veterinary professional may be also a factor.

“As a profession, we are passionate; we are selfless; we try really hard and don’t accept defeat easily,” says Chicago veterinarian Dr. Natalie Marks. “We don’t leave the job at the office, it comes home with us. We take what we do to heart. Those are really excellent qualities. But that also leaves us emotionally vulnerable.”

The more empathy you have, the better you may be at decoding dogs’ facial expressions.

The most reliable indicator of how well you can understand your dog is just practice, plain and simple: People who have owned dogs, or spent time around dogs, are generally more adept at decoding canine cues than those who shy away from anything furry and slobbery. But according to a study in the journal PLOS ONE, experience alone does not a dog whisperer make: Your personality — and, specifically, how empathetic you are — plays a role, too.'

There have been many studies showing that animals (e.g. rodents, birds, chimps) experience distress or concern (empathic response) when observing either kin or non-kin in distress. For example, giving electric shocks to rats and pigeons.

The observer experienced a change both behaviourally and physiologically, and these responses are often considered as an experience of emotional contagion, an elementary form of empathy. Emotional contagion is essentially the spreading of all forms of emotion from one person (or animal) to another (like the spreading of joy or distress through a crowd - think of a flash mob dance effect filtering through a crowd)2.

Contrary to popular belief, having a dog or cat in the home does not improve the mental or physical health of children, according to a new RAND Corporation study.

The findings, published online by the journal Anthrozoos, are from the largest-ever study to explore the belief that pets can improve children’s health by increasing physical activity and strengthen young people’s empathy skills.

“We could not find evidence that children from families with dogs or cats are better off either in terms of their mental well-being or their physical health,” said Layla Parast, a co-author of the study and a statistician at RAND, a nonprofit research organization.

Although signs of empathy have now been well documented in non-human primates, only during the past few years have systematic observations suggested that a primal form of empathy exists in rodents. Thus, the study of empathy in animals has started in earnest.

Here we review recent studies indicating that rodents are able to share states of fear, and highlight how affective neuroscience approaches to the study of primary-process emotional systems can help to delineate how primal empathy is constituted in mammalian brains.

Cross-species evolutionary approaches to understanding the neural circuitry of emotional ‘contagion’ or ‘resonance’ between nearby animals, together with the underlying neurochemistries, may help to clarify the origins of human empathy.

In a study recently published in Animal Cognition, dogs displayed emotional contagion after hearing negative emotional sounds from humans and other dogs. This was the first study on canine empathy to compare dogs’ behavioral responses to negative and positive emotional sounds, “[increasing] our knowledge on animal emotions and behavior,” the investigators wrote.

Empathy is the ability to recognize and share another individual’s emotions. Emotional contagion is a social phenomenon, previously defined as “an automatic and unconscious emotional state-matching between two individuals.” Various species, including primates and rodents, can demonstrate emotional contagion. Notably, dogs exhibit intraspecies and interspecies emotional contagion, making them an ideal model to study this concept.

Cohabitation between a male rat and a familiar rat of the same age submitted to social stress activates a behaviour similar to empathy.

This is the result of a study conducted by researchers at the University of Parma, published in the prestigious international journal Psychoneuroendocrinology.

The study showed that an animal experiencing acute stress after having been defeated by an aggressive rat, induces a high degree of emotional contagion in its cagemate that exhibits a higher heart rate, high levels of circulating corticosterone and social anxiety.

They examined what factors affected whether people offered support to victims

Social closeness was found to be more important than physical proximity

And the behaviour demonstrated was found to be similar to that of chimps

Offering hugs and friendly touches to soothe victims of violence seems to be a primal instinct inherited from our primate ancestors.

That's the finding of a new study that has documented this behaviour scientifically in human adults for the first time.

The research has found that chimps and humans console victims of violence in remarkably similar ways. And the cause in both cases is a sense of empathy that is shared by people and great apes, according to the researchers.

Post-aggression consolation is assumed to occur in humans as well as in chimpanzees. While consolation following peer aggression has been observed in children, systematic evidence of consolation in human adults is rare. We used surveillance camera footage of the immediate aftermath of nonfatal robberies to observe the behaviors and characteristics of victims and bystanders.

Consistent with empathy explanations, we found that consolation was linked to social closeness rather than physical closeness. While females were more likely to console than males, males and females were equally likely to be consoled.

Furthermore, we show that high levels of threat during the robbery increased the likelihood of receiving consolation afterwards. These patterns resemble post-aggression consolation in chimpanzees and suggest that emotions of empathic concern are involved in consolation across humans and chimpanzees.

Empathy has long been considered a uniquely human trait, but it's an ability that has also been observed in apes and other animals. Primatologist Frans de Waal says that examples of empathy in non-human primates and other mammals suggest that empathy has a long evolutionary history in humans.

Frans de Waal is the C.H. Candler Professor of Psychology at Emory University where he directs the Living Links Center for the Advanced Study of Ape and Human Evolution. He’s the author of several books including The Age of Empathy, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?

See how monkeys teach manners, elephants show empathy and ants imitate water in ScienceTake, combining cutting-edge research from the world of science with stunning footage of the natural world in action.

Highly empathetic people experience the facial expression of dogs more intensely than their less empathetic peers. Researchers with the University of Helsinki and Aalto University found human empathy isn't limited to the human species. The ability to share and understand another's feelings is an expansive trait.

"Empathy affected assessments of dogs' facial expressions even more than previous experience of dogs, probably because the face is a biologically important stimulus for humans," Miiamaaria Kujala, a postdoctoral researcher at Helsinki, said in a news release. "Our earlier studies have showed, however, that when considering the entire body language of dogs, previous experience of dogs increases in importance."''Brooks Hays

A study by the University of Helsinki and Aalto University explored how empathy and other psychological factors affect people’s assessments of the facial images of dogs and humans.

The results show for the first time that human empathy, or the ability to share someone else’s feelings or experiences, also affects perceptions of the facial expressions of pet dogs.

“Empathy affected assessments of dogs’ facial expressions even more than previous experience of dogs, probably because the face is a biologically important stimulus for humans. Our earlier studies have showed, however, that when considering the entire body language of dogs, previous experience of dogs increases in importance,” explains postdoctoral researcher Miiamaaria Kujala.

Sharing your scoops to your social media accounts is a must to distribute your curated content. Not only will it drive traffic and leads through your content, but it will help show your expertise with your followers.

Integrating your curated content to your website or blog will allow you to increase your website visitors’ engagement, boost SEO and acquire new visitors. By redirecting your social media traffic to your website, Scoop.it will also help you generate more qualified traffic and leads from your curation work.

Distributing your curated content through a newsletter is a great way to nurture and engage your email subscribers will developing your traffic and visibility.
Creating engaging newsletters with your curated content is really easy.